The National Surveillance World = “endemic surveillance” rise of massive national surveillance

[L. Coyote]

The National Surveillance World
BY Scott Horton - Jan 2, 2008 - http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002084

What do Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush and Hu Jintao have in common? They are the heads of the three most significant nations whose people live under “endemic surveillance” —that is to say, whose governments have a penchant for aggressively spying on their own people. Let’s just call their realms Eurasia, Oceania and East Asia.

For those interested in tracking the disintegration of civil rights as a global phenomenon and the simultaneous rise of massive national surveillance bureaucracies, we have a significant tool. Two NGOs, Privacy International, a UK privacy group, and the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center have compiled a system for measuring surveillance societies, rating various nations for their civil liberties records. In general they find, unsurprisingly, that nations recently liberated from Communism (excluding Russia) are those which most zealously guard civil liberties and attempt to contain surveillance of their populace. The U.S. had a strong tradition for protecting its citizenry from surveillance, which collapsed under George W. Bush. Here are the results:

..........

[givemebackmycountry]

1. Yep - I posted THIS yesterday and it sank like a stone...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3936638&mesg_id=3936638

Check out the graph.
We should be SO FUCKING proud of ourselves.

Maybe NOW this will get a second life.

[L. Coyote]

4. This simply is not news to anyone here.

[JDPriestly]

2. UK is the most surveilled of all countries.

Why are these top dogs so insecure about what us little guys are doing? It baffles me.

[Wizard777]

3. Once again We The People are the enemy. We should have burned DC to the ground when Reagan

"officially" Declared War on America.

[The2ndWheel]

5. Yeah, but it hardly just showed up since Bush

The gathering of increasing amounts of information isn't new. If the technology exists to do it, it will be done. If the profits exist to do it, it will be done.

Wow, the corporation and the state not only want any and all information about the interchangeable cogs formerly known as human beings, but they get us to pay for our own surveillance. Talk about a sweet deal.

I'd say get used to it, but there will be a bigger database, and a more detailed camera, before you could. All I can say is don't be shocked by it. In a world where everything about corporations and governments needs to be known by the people so that we can function as a democracy, everything about the people needs to be known by the corporation and the government so that the functioning of the democracy is as efficient as possible. Unfortunately we don't get to have the best of both worlds. If you want the good, you have to take the bad.

Again, this is a process thousands of years in the making. It didn't just happen in December of 2000. It's not going to stop in January of 2009, here in the US, or anywhere. As long as we have the energy to continue to centralize, standardize, and control every aspect of life, this is where we're going, and there isn't much to be done about it.